santosh_soc

 Profile Answers by santosh_soc 

• Nov 19th, 2007

 

Edison Effect is also refferred as "Thermionic emission". Here the charge carriers flow from a charge-carrying surface due to vibrations caused by thermal energy.
This phenomenon can be seen in the house-hold electrical bulb in which is a metal filament is heated by the thermal energy from electricity.

kirisave

 Profile Answers by kirisave 

• May 14th, 2008

 

In a conducting material, the electrons are governed by Fermi-Dirac statistics. The baseline electron energy is the Fermi Energy*, and at low temperatures the electrons all exist at or below this level. As temperature is increased, so the distribution function for the electrons develops a high energy 'tail'. Some of these electrons have sufficient energy to pass over the surface potential barrier between the material and the vacuum. This process of increasing the temperature of a bulk material to increase the number of electrons which can leave the material is called thermionic emission or Edison effect.